PT151 S4 Q24 ExplanationAfter a nuclear power plant

Answer choices, explained

1. A

   No Support: no tellurium in core7% picked this

   Radioactive material ejected into the environment directly from a nuclear power plant's core would not

   We know that stuff coming from spent fuel rods wouldn't have tellurium, but we have no idea whether tellurium gets ejected directly from the plant's core. All we know about the plant's core is that heavy isotopes don't get ejected.

   7%
2. B

   Correct55% picked this

   The radioactive material detected by the researcher was carried into the atmosphere by the steam that was

   Why this is right

   This seems like plausible story for why the researchers were finding these three isotopes in the atmosphere downwind from the plant. But it's a very speculative story. Steam may have been in contact with the core, in which case it may have picked up the three isotopes from the core, which dissolve easily into steam. (Dissolving kind of means "absorbed into" -- when you dissolve salt into water, the crystals disappear but the salt molecules have not. That's why it now tastes like salt water.) Ultimately, this answer wins because it's more supported than anything else, but it definitely goes down in the record books as one of the more speculative correct answers. Sometimes on Most Supported, the correct answer is pretty distant from the passage, but it's more conservative of a guess than anything else we're offered. Here's another example of a Solve the Causal Mystery style Most Supported question.

   Skill tested: Most Supported · how this choice captures the argument's function is the move to repeat next time.

   55%
3. C

   Out of Scope: damage7% picked this

   The nuclear power plant's spent fuel rods were

   The passage doesn't talk at all about whether the spent fuel rods were / weren't damaged. We just know that tellurium wouldn't have come from spent fuel rods, regardless of their health / damage.

   7%
4. D

   Contradicted22% picked this

   The researchers found some radioactive material from spent fuel rods as well as some material that was ejected into the atmosphere

   This answer is trying to appeal to students who are thinking that "the iodine and cesium came from the spent fuel rods, but the tellurium was ejected directly from the plant's core". Thus, they would sign off on the idea that some of what the researchers found (the non-tellurium stuff) came from the rods and the rest came from the core. First of all, that's an exotic hypothesis. We're now positing two different sources for where these three isotopes came from, when the passage is offering a different storyline that would only involve on source (steam that passed by the core). Secondly, we can't really sign off on the idea that the researchers found anything that was ejected directly from the core, because we were told that stuff ejected directly would have heavy isotopes, and what researchers found id not have heavy isotopes.

   22%
5. E

   No Support10% picked this

   Spent fuel rods do not contain heavy isotopes in

   We don't know anything about whether or not spent fuel rods contain heavy isotopes. We only know they don't contain significant amounts of tellurium (which is not a heavy isotopes to begin with).

   10%